Have you ever thought that pixelating your sensitive information in photos, videos or streams, such as password or credit card details or mail ID, is safe? If you believe that it’s secure, then this article is for you. I’m going to explain in this article how your pixelate data is not secure and how pixelate text can be transformed into normal text by hackers.
Pixelization is a common technique used to mask sensitive information or for censorship, by reducing the resolution of the specific part or region in an image.
A researcher with a beurtschipper alias has developed a tool named “depix” that can potentially depixelate the image or decrypt the pixelate image and recover the passwords and several confidential details.
Depix works by matching the blocks of a known pixelated text with the test image. Although it doesn’t warrant a 100% accurate output but it does produce a pretty clear output which can make it easier to guess the correct password.
Command to install tool:
Let’s see an example:
Python depix.py –p images/testimages/testimage3_pixels.png –s images/searchimages/debruinseq_notepad_Windows10_closeAndSpaced.png –o output.png
